Over the last two years, Apple could not have asked for easier market conditions: The iPhone 6 was a huge hit, and eighteen months later Samsung's phone business collapsed after the disastrous Note 7 launch.

Yet Apple largely failed to take advantage of Samsung's bad luck. Its iPhone business is in decline, in terms of units sold. And its share of the global smartphone market has almost halved since 2014, according to new statistics from the research firm Gartner Inc.

First, I take a picture of the postcard and upload it to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, usually Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 International. These two licenses allow anyone to use the image of my artwork for both non-commercial and commercial purposes, modify and remix them. And uploading to Wikimedia Commons puts my artwork in a place where many people will see it.

Particle announced Raspberry Pi support for its “Particle Cloud” IoT development platform, and has launched a $100 starter kit based on the Raspberry Pi 3.

Particle is opening its Particle Cloud IoT development platform to integrate Raspberry Pi-based endpoints, expanding its lineup of prototyping hardware from MCU-based devices like the Internet Button to more advanced Linux-driven devices. The first 1,000 developers to sign up for the Raspberry Pi beta will be offered a first wave of access on Nov. 22.

Notwithstanding the antenna connectors themselves, the hardware is nice. I ordered the black metal case, and I must admit I love the many LED lights in the front. It is especially useful to have color changes in the reset procedure: no more guessing what state the device is in or if I pressed the reset button long enough. The LEDs can also be dimmed to reduce the glare that our electronic devices produce.

For those of you that have been keeping up with AMD’s Boltzmann Initiative, the company has been moving at a rapid clip to overhaul its HPC software stack for use with its GPUs. AMD's solution not only compares favorably with NVIDIA's CUDA, but developers can also reuse much of its code base (up to 90 percent according to AMD).

Geniatech’s “Development Board IV” is a 96Boards-like SBC that runs Android or Debian on a Snapdragon 410, and features 40- and 60-pin expansion connectors.

Linaro’s 96Boards spec has taken off to the point that we’re beginning to see clones and near-clones that are not yet sanctioned by 96Boards.org with an official mark of compliance, as in the case of Fujitsu’s 96Boards CE compatible F-Cue SBC. In the case Geniatech’s Development Board IV, there is not even a mention of 96Boards. The SBC, which is also referred to as Developer Board 4 and DB4, has 96Boards-like 40- and 60-pin connectors, and a feature set that is very similar to that of Qualcomm/Arrow’s DragonBoard 410c.

Nintendo’s NES Classic is, at its core essence, a Nintendo-approved NES emulator that comes with 30 ROMs. It feels very similar to the sort of thing people have been building for ages by running Linux on a Raspberry Pi — with the main difference from a conceptual standpoint being that the NES Classic is considerably less legally questionable.

There’s a very good chance that if you’re reading Geek.com you were already excited about the launch of the NES Classic Mini. Here’s some more exciting news: it’s actually a Linux PC, and it may also be hackable.

Gamespot’s Peter Brown took apart the Classic Mini to see what made it tick. He was a more than a little disappointed by what he found — that the Mini’s flash memory was soldered directly to the mainboard. That seemed like bad news since it meant that unless you had a fairly light touch with a soldering iron that you wouldn’t be augmenting the Mini’s default stash of 30 games.

He was a late nineties phenomenon, a mounted animatronic latex fish that sang songs while jiggling itself about and turning to face you. The early ones were motion activated, so when you walked past you’d be frightened so much you’d need a heart sturgeon. It was only later that you could trigger Bobby McFerrin and Al Green covers by pressing a button.

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We already knew that Amazon’s AI assistant was open source, and was available as a Raspberry Pi project long before Echo reached this country. So what’s the next logical step? Apparently this.

Orange Pi might not be a big name in the computer industry but the company seems to be doing all things right to get noticed. The computer manufacturer has come up with a 64-bit quad-core computer that can easily find its utility in several projects. However, the most lucrative aspect about this compact-sized computer is its price, as it costs just $20 (roughly Rs. 1,300).

One year, three months and 100 million transactions later the service is about to make a quantum leap in user experience as it’s becoming available in three new countries at once and is about to start supporting online and in-app purchase as well as location-based deals and stuff. You wouldn’t expect this from a company who’s coming off such “burning” issues, yet we are.

Google just released the November security update and around that time we also see the platform’s official distribution numbers as well. This data was recorded during the 7-day period between November 1st and November 7th, and Google reminds us that any version of Android that doesn’t make up at least 0.1% of the platform is not represented here in this graph. Yet, we’re still seeing Android 2.2 Froyo being used by 0.1% of the people who are accessing the Play Store.

If you are in the market for an inexpensive USB logic analyser you have a several choices, but few of them deliver much in the way of performance. There are kits from China for a few dollars using microcontrollers at their heart, but they fail to deliver significant sample rates. If you require more, you will have to pay for it.

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This project has the promise to add a very useful piece of test equipment to the armoury of the engineer on a budget, and to aid the cost-conscious reader he’s provided extensive documentation and installation instructions, as well as the code for the FPGA. Thanks to one of the more awesome hacks of 2015, there is an entirely open toolchain for this Lattice part, and our own [Al Williams] has written up a multi-part getting-started guide if you want to get your feet wet. You probably want one of these anyway, and now it’s a logic analyzer to boot.

If you are looking for a large format CNC machine you might be interested in a new open source system which has been created by Bar Smith in the form of the Maslow CNC which provides a cutting surface 8 x 4ft in size.

Last month was the controversy over some Lenovo Yoga laptops not working with Linux that was first alleged to be due to a Microsoft "Signature PC" requirement that later turned out to be incorrect. Well, the good news now is that Lenovo has issued a BIOS update and should allow for better Linux compatibility.

The new BIOS release that's specifically targeting Linux users now creates an AHCI SATA Controller Mode option from the BIOS and once that's enabled, you should have no problems installing Linux on the Yoga Y900. This BIOS update isn't intended for WIndows users.

This year for Halloween, we decided to construct a witch's workbench out on the front porch. A trip to the local op shop produced an attractive candlestick, mortar (no pestle), and a small collection of bottles. Witches are nothing if not tidy, so we figured that bottles found near a serious witch's workshop would surely be carefully labeled. After all, one wouldn't want to accidentally use an eye of a frog when the potion calls for an eye of newt, would one?

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.